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The Meaning of "Total Loss"

How To Dress Well: "The record for me is a whole bunch of people, experiences, places that I’ve left behind either by choice or not by choice. People who’ve been stolen out of my life. I’ve had to abandon certain paths in my life to save myself, save other people. Loss is a feature of our lives as humans. The human condition is to be finite, thrown into this elemental flux where our bodies are constantly decaying and we’re progressing every day towards our own death. You never know if it’s tomorrow or in 30 years. If you’re lucky you get to live long enough, and sadly if you live long enough, you end up seeing everyone you love fall into the ground.

“One way of reading that is you’re fucked either way. Another way of reading it is that loss is what makes things meaningful. If your infant child were to no longer be an infant child some day, it wouldn’t be that special. You’d just be like ‘I have an infant child,’ but you’re like ‘Aw fuck it, I have this now, and I will not have it forever.’ Loss is what makes things have the meaning that they have. I learned a lot about this when I lost a friend of mine, and I was all of a sudden I was just like ‘Fuck I do not value people in my life enough. I do not value my friends enough.’ And it took that loss for me, to go through that loss, to learn this kind of lesson, and that’s kind of what the record is about, and why it’s called Total Loss.

I learned a lot about this when I lost a friend of mine, and I was all of a sudden I was just like ‘F**k I do not value people in my life enough. I do not value my friends enough.’ And it took that loss for me, to go through that loss, to learn this kind of lesson, and that’s kind of what the record is about, and why it’s called Total Loss.

“Imagine attuning yourself or developing an ethical attitude, where you looked at the world, and thought to yourself, ‘This could all disappear.’ I feel like that attention, that prayer of the soul, would bring you to a relationship with the world where you just loved everything. You’d have this totally different sensitivity, and the kinds of emotions you would experience would be so different. If you go through loss you’re not going to just be happy. You’re going to have this weird—again I’m repeating myself but these are the themes I’m thinking of—this ambiguous emotional state where you’re not going to just be happy that you’re with someone you love, you’re both going to be happy, and there’s going to be this registration of the fact that’s it’s temporary, it’s finite. You will lose this person or they will lose you. The natural course will follow.

“The closest thing I believe in, to like religion, is through this experience. You have an intuition of the fact that everything is finite. If you don’t think things are finite, the world just looks grey. If you start to really see that things are going to, that this moment is totally singular and special, the world just starts to shimmer in a totally different way. So that’s like, the zone. That’s why the record has this weird emotional tenor where like, some songs are quite sad, other songs are quite joyous. And then other songs are somehow indiscernible both at once. That’s the whole zone. So it’s not exactly about a loss that I experienced, but rather an insight about a loss that I had, through loss, through losing people, and that insight has become a way of life in my mind.”